A woman named Tina drinks gin at sunset
before a pair of drawn curtains that frame
the dry grasslands and tangerine hilltops
of her native country. An insurance bill
is pinned to the desk top by a calculator
The curtains are purple.
The man she intends to marry is reserved
as a dark prairie pond. He paints radio storms
in the basement beside a globe of Mars,
his hair and shoes the color of ox blood.
The local graveyard is now run
by the management company he owns.
Stones are strewn on the even pathways
like the exploded bits of a larger rock.
Annually starlings fill the trees
as if commanded by a book on Death
And she, a manicurist who digs the intimacy
of her work, holds hands for a living.
Perfecting the extremities of oilmen and bankers.
But this man, this man she intends to marry,
is strange. She wonders, What’s the deal with
quiet people, can they read minds? Just then
a junebug flies in and lands on a curtain.
The purple curtain on her right.
My left, her right.
-David Berman
